Welcome to this edition of 4 Moms, 35 Kids: How Moms of Many Manage. This week we’re talking lunch. Since homeschoolers are generally home every day for lunch we have the ability to serve hot, homemade lunches to our children every day, in theory. It generally doesn’t work out that way in our home.

When I have a lunch menu planned out, we eat more of a variety of healthy foods and I’m not scrambling last minute to think of something to feed the eleven people who are home each day at lunch time.

We keep the same weekly menu plan until someone gets weary of the current one and decides to work up a new one. This gives us a standard list of groceries that we should have in the house and makes it easier for our family to eat within our food budget.

This also ensures that we don’t revert to our regular mommy-didn’t-make-a-lunch-menu eating plan which goes something like this:

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We like to eat what we call “Tuna-Corn-n-Rice.” I make a tuna salad type mixture by mixing two cans of tuna with one can of corn and enough mayonnaise for consistency, and serve it over a bed of hot rice. I’ve eaten this since I was a little girl and if you love tuna, corn and rice, you’ll this! It was my Hispanic mom’s concoction as Hispanic mom’s are notorious for strange ones! We also like grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna-melts (like a grilled cheese, but you add tuna), and grilled ham and cheese.

I was almost laughing out loud reading this!! We have the same experiences here all week! If bread, then this…if no bread, then tortillas, if no tortillas, then crackers…etc. I have been working on a master meal schedule and had already concluded that I *needed* to schedule lunches and probably even breakfasts. Now, it’s confirmed!!! I am excited! In a way, scheduling sounds constricting, but I am finding great amounts of pressure being relieved when we add even more items to our schedule!! Isn’t the Lord so sweet!!! Thanks for posting this. I will take our family’s interests to heart and move forward!! Blessings!

Hilarious, Kim! Your ‘no-plan’ lunch plan is extremely similar to mine, except we don’t do tortillas but crackers instead. I should do a couple of lunch menu plans so I can swap them out easier when we get bored. Otherwise, we get bored and it’s ages before I do another plan!

Have you ever looked up “Muffin Tin Mondays”? I came across it a few years ago. It’s genius. It’s basically like bento-style lunches, except you fill up a 6 holed muffin tin with different foods. You can do themes, if you want or just fill them with whatever leftover bits of stuff you have. It’s great when you don’t have a lot of any one thing. It’s novel and fun for kiddos I don’t do it every week, but I could. My boys & their cousins LOVE when we do!

True, 10 might take a while. The most I’ve done are 6. It wasn’t too difficult, like an assembly line of sorts. What if 6 kids filled one hole each or something like that for you (like one kid does the veggies, another the fruit, another the dairy, etc)? Again, I don’t do it all the time, but as a novelty every now and then

What a BRILLIANT idea! I only have 3 kiddos but I find my self in the same boat. I will definitely be implementing your idea at our house! Maybe I”ll even help my 9-year-old daughter do the planning and implementation. It would be good practice for meal planning and prep. Thanks for the great idea!

I needed this reminder. I started letting my kids plan their lunches in April, and it was a big success, they had rules and I helped, but it took all the stress out and the kids where happier to eat lunch. I should never have stopped when school got out. Hmm sounds like something to do tonight!

Well, camp has ended and I have to start cooking again… plus school starts next week, so it was time to get some lunch menu ideas. That means I finally breezed my way through these link ups. Thank you so much for hosting this!

My husband is currently home everyday for lunch and I almost need to do this for him. Everyday he spends more time in the kitchen trying to decide what to eat for lunch than he does actually eating. I have a list of suggestions on the fridge now to give him ideas.

Another easy sandwich recipe is to take canned chicken and a can of crushed pineapple drained. I usually use 2 5oz cans of chicken to 1 20 oz can of pineapple. Add just enough mayonnaise to hold it together. I LOVE this as a sandwich.

Thank you for your help with the naps. Hopefully, he just goes through periods of no napping once in a while. I have noticed that you lunch menu does not seem to involve vegetables such as broccoli and I am wondering how much you push such vegetables. My 2-year old son has always been very picky about what he eats. Have you had any problems with picky eater. If so, how did or would you resolve the situation. We have spanked, we have said you cannot get down until you finish what is on your plate (which I dont think is too much at all.) or we have put it back in the fridge and made him eat the same thing later. Sometimes he eats wonderful and there are foods he generally eats better but he still refuses once in a while. I want to be consistent but I haven’t found what quite works yet. Thank you.